Lessons From a Master Cat Photographer

The Look pages in this weekend’s magazine feature Walter Chandoha’s pictures of the old Penn Station, which he took in the late 1940s in between classes at N.Y.U.’s School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance (now the Stern School of Business). After one of these photographic excursions, Chandoha found a stray kitten in the Village and took it back to his home in Astoria, Queens.

The cat, appropriately named Loco, acted up nightly, darting around the apartment, shadowboxing its image in the mirror. Chandoha photographed its antics and submitted the results to the Brooklyn Eagle’s weekly photo contests, regularly earning $5 or $10 for each winning photo. After honing his trade with other cats and dogs, and winning more contests, Chandoha eventually decided to go pro. “I was a freelance photographer,” he says. “I called myself a professional, but it took a little time to actually earn a living.”

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Loco the cat.Credit Walter Chandoha

Hungry for readers’ eyes on newsstands, weekly “roto” magazines (short for rotogravure, the high-fidelity process by which some magazines, including ours, are printed) would occasionally place an endearing animal on the cover in full color. Chandoha, trained in marketing and possessed of a wealth of pet pictures, pitched his images and cheeky copy directly to the art departments of magazines. With his wife, Maria, serving as animal handler and art director, Chandoha’s first breakthrough was a Christmas-themed portrait of a kitten on the cover of Women’s Home Companion in December 1951. Early success eventually led to national ads for Purina, 9-Lives and even the aerospace industry.

In the early ’70s, Chandoha published “How to Shoot and Sell Animal Photos.” Any artist could benefit from this straightforward manual. Chapters like “Learning to Visualize” help you unlock the “creative memory core” through research into a target market. Other sections like “Patience” and “When to Go Pro” address issues of developing your craft and when to quit the day job.

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Chandoha eventually became a cat photography expert and offered lectures to camera clubs.Credit

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…